Name: Yuval Harari with Kara Swisher
Start: 2024-10-01T19:30:00-07:00
Location: Sydney Goldstein Theater

Yuval Noah Harari has a brilliant and unique ability to take his extensive knowledge of world history and present broad, accessible, and helpful understandings of humanity. Harari’s next book, NEXUS, looks to better understand our current information revolution, exploring what new technologies have in store for us.
For the last 100,000 years, we Sapiens have accumulated enormous power. But despite all our discoveries, inventions, and conquests, we now find ourselves in an existential crisis. The world is on the verge of ecological collapse, misinformation abounds, and we are rushing headlong into the age of AI—a new information network that threatens to annihilate us. For all that we have accomplished, why are we so self-destructive? NEXUS looks through the long lens of human history to consider how the flow of information has shaped us and our world. Taking us from the Stone Age, through the canonization of the Bible, early modern witch-hunts, Stalinism, Nazism, and the resurgence of populism today, Harari asks us to consider the complex relationship between information and truth. He explores how different societies and political systems throughout history have wielded information to achieve their goals, for good and ill, and addresses the urgent choices we face as non-human intelligence threatens our very existence.
Professor Yuval Noah Harari is a historian, philosopher, and the bestselling author of Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow, 21 Lessons for the 21st Century, and the series Sapiens: A Graphic History and Unstoppable Us. He is considered one of the world’s most influential public intellectuals working today. Born in Israel in 1976, Harari received his Ph.D. from the University of Oxford in 2002. He is currently a lecturer at the Department of History at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and a Distinguished Research Fellow at the University of Cambridge’s Centre for the Study of Existential Risk. Harari co-founded the social impact company Sapienship, focused on education and storytelling, with his husband, Itzik Yahav.
Throughout every era of digital technology, from the dot com bubble to artificial intelligence, Kara Swisher has been a key figure in understanding the rapid growth in Silicon Valley, whether reporting for The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and other major outlets, or as co-host of the podcast Pivot. Swisher is founder of the All Things Digital conference and the technology news website Recode, and the author of three books, including her new memoir, Burn Book: A Tech Love Story.
A limited number of tickets include a copy of Yuval Noah Harari’s new book, NEXUS: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI.